Urban Cuts: Appropriation and Resistance in the American City

The Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University invites papers for its Second Visual Culture Graduate Student Conference, to be held April 16-18, 2010 in St. Louis, Missouri. This year’s conference theme, “Urban Cuts: Appropriation and Resistance in the American City,” coincides with the “Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark” exhibition at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis.

Proposals are welcome from all disciplines exploring visual representations of conflicting uses and contested meanings of urban space. Taking a cue from Matta-Clark’s “cuts,” we seek contributions addressing the effects of changes in urban geography on people’s daily lives. We are particularly interested in projects that examine the role of photography, film, advertising, fine art, performance, architecture, design, and/or new media. We encourage submissions by graduate students working transnationally and comparatively on urban environments.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Representation & Iconography of Urban Space
- Demolition, Destruction & Displacement
- Fractured/Fragmented Space
- Contested Ownership
- Political Activism through Urban Space
- Memory & Subjectivity
- “Anarchitecture” as concept and practice
- Abandonment & Neglect
- Urban Renewal
- Urban Performance as Resistance

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a curriculum vitae by January 15, 2010 to vcc2010@slu.edu.
Additional information is available here. For questions, please contact Elizabeth Wolfson (vcc2010@slu.edu).

By guest correspondent Elisabeth Ross

A little while ago, the New York Times ran a story about the so-called “family dinner” predicament, which in this latest commentary was anchored by yet another study suggesting an association between frequency of family dinners and adolescent substance abuse rates.

The photograph accompanying the article on the front page of the Style section forecasts the nostalgic, eternal return to that staple of the modern visual lexicon: the mid-century kitchen, complete with iconic 1950s housewife emerging to present a casserole to her adoring family seated at the table.

The faded pastels, washed out background, and dinner table floating in a cloud of whiteness suggest an ethereal quality, interrupted only by the father’s black suit.  He sits slightly off balance, imitated by his son, but not quite able to project full parental authority.  The smile is a little too forced.  Is he nervous?  Maybe he and his wife have just had a fight.  Maybe he’s wondering if that casserole is about to hit him in the head.  Maybe she’s looking at it, gauging just how much she’d have to clean up afterward and if it’s even worth it.

Of course, that’s not what we’re supposed to be thinking.  But we have seen this sanitized domesticity performed so many times, that we should know better than to confuse the ideal with the real.  The image of the dressed-up housewife in her otherworldly kitchen can be considered today in terms of underlying doubt, anxiety, and potential for transgression.  In this way, the image speaks to another photograph from the same article:

In this 21st century family tableau, the mother is similarly turned inward, that is, facing her family and facing away from the viewer.  Comparison with the first image is supposed to be damming: look, for example, at how the four individuals are eating junk food while strapped into seats that keep them separated from one another.  But that’s not the only way to see it.  The space is private but mobile, comfortable, and with modern amenities at hand.  The mother–nothing suggests she is a housewife: no apron, no casserole, no husband, no house–is firmly planted in the driver’s seat.  The pink apron is replaced by business-casual black.  Mom’s in charge.  At least, of dinner.

And that’s part of the problem.

After presenting the inverse ratio of family dinner frequency to teen drug use, the article parenthetically notes that 80% of family dinners are prepared by women (while still holding 50% of all jobs) and then features interviews with 8 women, who describe their commitment to or reluctant abandonment of the family dinner (one woman would only admit to the latter on the condition of anonymity).

Every year for the last decade or so, we hear the same statistics linking family meals to an assortment of psycho-developmental benefits for children.  The data does not show causation, researchers admit, rather, simply an association.  Which means that any number of variables on both sides of the equation would change the actual cause and effect outcomes dramatically.

So what is really going on here?  The Columbia University authors of this latest study are also the folks who created “Family Day, ” designed to promote family dinners.  (This year, it was September 28, in case you missed it).  The website has a “sponsors and partners” link which, when clicked, display giant logos; among others are Stouffers, Coca-Cola, and Smuckers.  And anyone who has visited a supermarket recently will have noticed a revival of food products marketed as quick and easy ways to get the Family Dinner ready.

Keeping in mind that the iconic images of 1950s housewives and their kitchens were strategically deployed to promote an entire postwar aesthetic tied to consumer spending, one should ask what such images really show and what does that have to do with reality, then or now, not to mention quality time with the kids. “I don’t think we really know what a good family dinner is,” one psychologist notes in the article. And apparently we don’t know what one looks like either.

Conjuring up 1950s iconography may work for some, but for others it is an invitation to shifting interpretations and resistance.  The housewife and her kitchen should invite interrogation, not surrender.  And one question to begin with might be why, in 2009, we are even suggesting that kids might be turned into drug addicts unless women conform to a model of family life that never really happened.

Photographs by Getty Images and Scott Dalton/New York Times.

Elisabeth Ross, a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, has no idea what her kids will have for dinner this evening.  She would like to salute Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University on this week becoming the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Dr. Ostrom was not permitted to take advanced math in high school because women were routinely advised at the time that they did not need trigonometry or calculus, “if they were going to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” (NPR interview, 10/12/09).  You can contact Elisabeth at e-ross@northwestern.edu.

One of the attractions of the beach is that so many distinctions seem to melt away into the broad expanses of  sun, sea, and sand.  Nature offers the same three elements to whoever is there, and there seems to be room enough for everyone, and–for the day, anyway–what more does anyone really need?  But, of course, even when life’s a beach, it is a life lived one way rather than another.  This image from the Hamptons is one example of what I mean.

I had to stare at this image initially to make sure that it was a photograph.  The pictorial values are evocative of the seaside reveries that were a favorite subject for painters around 1900.  (For one example having a tone similar to this scene, see Calm Morning (1904) by Frank Weston Benson.)  But if life is following art at the Hamptons, the closer source might be a J. Crew catalog.  The causal wealth on display here reflects that narrow niche of class and ethnicity, starting with the gorgeous blue and white beach towels.  The rest of the scene is more subdued, but the pattern continues: her pink and white shirt, the white breaker of the emerald wave,  white umbrellas on orange or yellow poles, the green chair between sand and sea foam.  Somehow this world is both colorful and very white.

The blue and white towels create a space of privileged intimacy within the scene, one mirrored by the second couple as well.  One member of each pair is eating and listening, savoring, as if there is no hurry, no need to worry about running out of time or anything else.  We see them from behind, while standing at a respectful distance, as if servants waiting to be summoned.  The photo depicts a summer idyll and also the image of an ideal life, but only for the few.

It should not be surprising that people of wealth can seem so at home in an image that appears to be an oil painting.  The photographer’s achievement has been to capture a representative moment in a social stratum by evoking the appropriate pictorial tone from another art and time, albeit while also channeling the commercial iconography that defines that way of life the present.  There is more than one beach, however, and more than one way to use a camera.

The caption in the Times (the source for both photos) read, “An early arrival at Orchard Beach in the Bronx staked out his territory on Saturday.  Estimates put the crowd at 59,000 by 5 p.m.”  I think this shot is hilarious.  It might as well be Rodney Dangerfield taking a break from Caddyshack.  The guy is a scandal according to the social and aesthetic values of the other photo: damn near naked, exposed to the world, but not before drawing a line in the sand that serves as a big “Keep Out” sign.  He looks like a beached whale with attitude, and instead of being huddled in luxury he’s stripped the day down to its essentials: bike, just enough clothing to be decent, a towel just big enough for his body, and a poor man’s moat to keep the 59,000 other people out of his face.

This slice of life on the other side of the cabana is presented courtesy of another photographic perspective. Instead of the faux intimacy of the painting, we have a documentary angle, seeing the subject from the side and set in context, as if a subject for sociological study.  And yet the distance is still respectful, allowing him the sovereignty of his temporary kingdom.  Unlike the Hamptons photograph, there is no implicit invitation via the fashion code to wish–or buy–our way into the scene.

One photo is from the beginning of summer and the other comes much closer to the end, but that is the least of their differences.  The question, however, is not which is the better way of life.  I’m not sure there even need be a question.  May you find your beach in what little summer remains.

Photographs by Jemal Countess/WireImage and Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times.

The Statue of Liberty is open for business again for the first time since 9/11.  As a result, New York photographers have had to deal with the task of finding a distinctive angle on one the the most familiar images in public art.  This one shows the lengths we all are expected to go to see the icon anew:

A child’s arm points upward while the massive statue looms above.  The photo is not likely to find its way into a photography textbook: we see nothing whole but instead only a truncated pedestal, sectioned statue, and disembodied person.  You have to peer into the image to locate the child’s small arm, which then makes the statue’s bulk all the more overpowering.  Distinguishing features are cut out of the picture while proportion is mangled.  In its place, attention is drawn to the institutional concrete and the heavy metalwork, and to the fragility and impermanence of the child’s limb.

But the photo is not cutting anything down to size.  Instead, it may be depicting a relationship between the national icon and the viewing public.  Note now the child’s arm is reproduced by the arm of the statue.  This is the only correspondence visible between the living person and the icon.  The parallelism is likely to be symbolic: and so, just as the statue is a token of America’s past, so is the child a sign of its future.  As both are aligned, and as the one is there to provide inspiration to the other, the implication is that America’s future will continue to be true to the ideals and aspirations of its past.

At this point, some would quote the text at the monument, say, about “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but my point is not to endorse a specific sentiment.  I do want to suggest, however, that the sentimental work of the 19th century public artwork is being continued today in two registers–by the statue itself and by its photographic reproduction.  Neither is innocent of complicated motives, but if you accept (as I do) that democracies depend on sentiments just as they depend on critical reason, then it is interesting to see how public arts continue to evoke such admittedly formulaic emotions.  Sometimes photography simply relays another artwork and much of the time it draws on its own iconography.  The image above does some of each.

An image of obvious fragmentation should also alert the viewer to its own limitations.  This view of the national monument makes it seem even more, well, monumental, while reducing actual citizens to the miniaturized status of a small child who can, of course, do little more than look and point.  The state may loom too large, and the people are now all but invisible individuals and certainly not masses that might be not so much huddled as unionized.  But perhaps that is too much of a stretch.  On the other hand, if we are to follow the lead of the photographers, we should be willing to consider more than one angle on our national icons, and on the state of the union they represent.

Photograph by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times.

Recently USA Today ran a photo contest to answer the question, “Can a single image capture the essence of America?”  Of the 1,035 entries, this one was judged to be the best:

It’s a fine image, and one can easily concur with the judges’ statement that it has “gorgeous color, beautiful light and a killer reflection.  The visual surprise makes the eye move back and forth, and the subject is emblematic of the American West.”

But wait a minute.  There is a difference between the first half of that judgment and the second.  Color, light, and the reflection are one thing, while surprise and emblematic representation are another.  In fact, water reflections are standard stuff in nature photography, so there would be little surprise there (nor would viewers be likely to be confused about which horses are real).  And what about the idea that the landscape is the definitive image of the American West–and therefore of America?  Can you get more conventional than that?

My unease wasn’t helped by the paper’s claim that the contest photos “capture America the beautiful beyond obvious landmarks to its glorious landscape and spacious skies.”  OK, no Statue of Liberty, but the Western landscape is an equally obvious visual figure, and it is clear from the text that our perception is supposed to be shaped by the iconography of “America the Beautiful.”  Sure enough, the second and third place photographs are from Antelope Canyon, Arizona and Arches National Park, Utah: in other words, they are beautiful examples of familiar scenes in the photographic archive of Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and similar house organs of travel photography.

The fourth place photo is of an ocean sunset, and so it goes.  Most tellingly, of the top ten photos, only two–numbers 6 and 10–include people.  In the first of these, we see children practicing with lariats at a “cowboy training camp” representing “family fun vacations in the American West”; in the second, there are tiny figures in the background of a photo of kites at a beach.

Don’t get me wrong–some of the contest entries are fine photographs.  But what about the big question: do they picture America?  If so, we may have a problem, because then America is in some important sense essentially empty.

If you look at the rest of the submissions, it seems evident that America is the West, which is largely void of people.  As Richard Avedon, Michael Shapiro, and others have stated before, this is not an innocent idea.  The photo operates ideologically, whether by hiding the workers, implying that natural resoures are boundless, or reinforcing assumptions about American exceptionalism and providentialism (as if Central Asia didn’t have similar vistas, or lacked God’s grace).

To be fair, however, we also have to note that these photos also are negotiating other problems of political representation: by not featuring people, no one ethnic or social group is given the privilege of being the “face” of America, and showing natural scenes through conventional iconography does supply the typical places and common objects that are necessary for the shared seeing that is a vital element of democratic public culture.

That said, it seems to me that we could do better.  The dedication and skill of the amateur photographers in the contest needs to be augmented by critical discussion of how one might represent “the essence of America.”  One argument is that there is no such thing to represent; another is that no one representation could do so.  On the other side, the US is not simply a neutral aggregation of autonomous individuals having nothing in common, and collective living requires common images and ongoing judgments about what is more or less representative.

And let me say it as clearly as possible: America is not empty.  Nor is the natural order of things walking serenely in single file.  Nor can photographs represent a political community as neatly as still water reflects horses.   Public life needs many images–these and others as well.  America is beautiful, but not because the people are invisible.

Photograph by Joanne Panizzera/USA Today.

The coverage of Obama’s speech in Cairo continued this weekend with a slide show at the New York Times.  The slides essentially were all the same, with each showing Obama’s televised image in one locale or another.  The set of slides included photographs from India, Africa, and LA, but the majority were from the Middle East.  The point, I assume, was to represent both a global audience and the likelihood of varied responses in diverse settings.  Too many of them, however, might as well have been Orientalist illustrations.

This photo from Cairo was the first in the set and thus capable of setting the frame. Obama is on the TV placed above a Coke machine–the only two electrical machines evident without close study of the photo–while the scene is dominated by the hookahs and Arabic script on the worn wall.  The US is aligned with modern technology, all the better for global distribution of our products and ideas, while those watching in the Middle East are still living in a bygone world of mysterious inscriptions and exotic customs.

The young man in the center of the frame is a particularly nice touch.  Lithe boys were one element of Orientalist iconography, although this kid is fully clothed for the contemporary US audience.  Indeed, he might pass for a young Obama.  Thus, he is the central object of struggle in the drama being constructed.  Will he be influenced by the parochial Arab culture that surrounds him, or by the American president?  Will the TV and Coke machine, which are on the border of this scene, be able to break the spell of the culture represented by the drug paraphernalia surrounding him?  Obviously, we are to hope that he will grow up to become a good citizen like his newly available role model, Barack Obama.  The fact that he will grow up in a dictatorship propped up by billions of dollars in US aid is not mentioned.

Were a Black Panther around, it might be mentioned.  The image of that kind of African-American community organizer has been conspicuously absent from the Obama haigiography, but the following image can bring the Panthers to mind.

This photo was not part of the Times slide show, perhaps because it complicates both sides of the rhetorical transaction.  Now Obama is projected onto the sunglasses of what could be a stony auditor, someone quite different from the supposedly impressionable young man shown above.  And Obama becomes a small yet garish image of himself, someone distant from the kind of politics represented by black men wearing dark glasses and hard faces.  Perhaps the image still contains a fantasy of media influence, as if the TV image were being projected from the screen through the glasses directly into the eye and brain.  (Note how equipment figures significantly in each photograph.)  But we see instead how an image can be reflected back toward the sender.  Instead of persuasion, we are shown resistance.

The second photo is from Riyadh, and so we should note that he probably is not black and if there is resistance it could be on behalf of privilege and dogmatism.  Both images are studies in some of the problems of persuasion, however, and they provide a basis for thinking about how to think about global audiences.  The first photograph presents an all too comfortable conception of the Middle East; the second suggests a critical counterpoint.  Each is but one account, and far too many others remain ignored.

Amr Nabil/Associated Press and Hassan Ammar/Associated Press.

Pop Quiz: One woman or two?

Or was it a trick question? There obviously are two women there, even if one is a copy of the other. And if you look closely, you can see small differences in hair or the accessories in the background or whatever else you want to pore over. But, of course, there also is only one woman there: a blond archetype of American femininity that is the model for each of these two Miami Dolphins cheerleaders.

The two bodies could almost be clones. And, of course, they are: not because they share a fair amount of genetic material, but because each is an near perfect copy of a social form. Each is identically styled to that conventional model, from physical training to gestural habits to costumes and make-up. Each will stand out because she so completely conforms to one set of social norms. Together they mirror not only each other but their society’s demand for conformity.

But don’t think that style is to blame. Or at least consider the other end of the spectrum:

There is only one of this guy, right? He is a model at the annual Face and Body Art International Convention. Who else could possibly look like this? (The style is the man.) But, of course, he is not so unique. He fits right into the body art subculture, and the artist is drawing on familiar conventions of mythic iconography and popular design. Just in case that context isn’t clear, notice the Mona Lisa figure in the left background. And, like the cheerleaders, his well-toned body is a standard typification of gender.

The cheerleaders train for hours to have a few minutes of spectacular performance, all at considerable cost to themselves and other women. Mr. Body Art is a model of self-fashioning, but only for a few hours in a convention center that tomorrow will be hosting Rotarians while he becomes just another guy on the street. Fashion alternates between conformity and unique self-assertion, and each depends on the other. Most of us spend our time between these two extremes, but we shouldn’t feel too smug about that. Among human beings, there are only differences of degree, never of kind.

Photographs by Abbey Drucker/VMAN Magazine (October 2008) and the Orlando Sentinel, and Vince Hobbs/Orlando Sentinel (2009).

Symposium: The Aesthetics of Catastrophe

Northwestern University
Friday, June 5, 2009
Annie May Swift Hall Auditorium

This symposium addresses questions of visual representation and public advocacy as they are evident in contemporary economic, environmental, and political disasters. Events such as floods, fires, terrorism, and genocide generate heightened media coverage, compelling images, and questions about the limits of photographic representation of events that involve massive disruption and loss. In the US, a series of disasters including 9/11, Katrina, and the economic crash have pushed photojournalists and media scholars alike to ask whether the available conventions for documentary witness need to be extended or reworked. This symposium provides images and arguments dedicated to provoking and guiding extended discussion of topics such as the violent image, visual fragmentation and political distribution, emergency status and citizenship, and the iconography of a “catastrophile” society.

Schedule:

9:00 – Coffee

9:30 – Ann Larabee, Michigan State University, “Brownfields, Ghostboxes, and Orange Xs: Reading Disaster and Catastrophe in the Urban Landscape”

10:45 – Robert Lyons, Photographer, “Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide”

1:00 – David Campbell, Durham University, UK, “Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza”

2:15 – Aric Mayer, Photographer, “Representing the Unrepresentable: Disaster, Suffering, and Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange”

3:30 – Lane Relyea, Northwestern University, “From Spectacle to Database: On the Changed Status of Debris and Fragmented Subjectivity in Recent Art Culture”

4:45 – Reception

Free and open to the public. Organized by Robert Hariman. Sponsored by the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the School of Communication, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University. For more information, please contact Patrick Wade at wpatrickwade@gmail.com.

American journalism’s vaunted self-image as a watchdog apparently stops at the curb of Wall Street. Instead of investigative journalism, the public is fed executive hagiographies and paeans to entrepreneurship and productivity. Even after the downward spiral of the last few months, the analysis often is devoted too much to praising the intelligence of the players and the complexity of the deals. The accompanying photos of gilded office towers and middle-aged guys in sharp clothes hardly diminishes the luster of those supposedly being scrutinized. And then, in a single stroke, an image appeared this weekend that stabbed through to the truth.

The image accompanied a New York Times article in the Sunday Business section of the paper on “How Lehman Got Its Real Estate Fix.” The title and this stunning photo illustration are the only suggestions of addiction in the paper. By contrast, in the article we learn of the keen intelligence and deeply reflective character of Mark Walsh, the financier who “pioneered” the practice of repackaging real estate debt to produce huge short term profits–and a massive backlog of toxic debt. But read all you want, as long as you look at the image and the truth exposed by its visual artistry.

Drug addicts can be smart, real smart, and also well educated and highly creative. They’re still addicts. A culture that is based on addiction can be dazzling and also incredibly destructive. The rest of the world is now waking up to the fact that we’ve been living with unchecked addiction, and the savings account has been looted, the future mortgaged, and trust destroyed.

And finally someone said so. The image doesn’t speak directly, of course, but a statement has been made. The image manipulates available iconography and our sense of scale to create a powerful sense of dislocation and abuse. How could that building be there? Well, how could trillions of dollars in wealth be shrunk to next to nothing, isn’t the entire debacle about losing any reasonable sense of proportion, any sense of natural limit or appropriate restraint? Why the Chrysler building? Well, wasn’t the damage done by some of the classiest firms on the Street, and weren’t they willing to use anything–anything–to feed their habit? And shooting up? Well, they were tough guys willing to take any risk, right?

If the image is scandalous, it is because that is what is needed to expose a culture of enabling and denial. Think about it. You don’t deal with addiction effectively by taking away the drug–or by giving the addict money and another chance at self-regulation. The life of the individual and of the family has to be re-examined and restructured to some positive end. The artists at the Times have revealed the true nature of the problem. That’s as much as they can do. Now we need to see if the current administration is willing to admit to what is wrong, and what needs to be done.

Photo illustration by the New York Times, May 3, 2009.  Cross posted at BAGnewsNotes.

I thought it was the hand of a priest:

Protestant upbringing + Lent + gold embroidery + blood + cross = mistaken perception based on murky tales of medieval cultic practices involving lurid displays of mortification. From there it’s a quick step to announcing that, once again, the church has blood on its hands.

In fact, the cross is not even a cross. And the priest is a matador. The matador’s hand is holding one of his swords, one obviously still sticky with the bull’s thick blood.

But one could say that this is not a sword. For anyone familiar with Christian iconography, the sword could very well double as a cross, and as only a cross, and particularly when smeared with blood. If the imagery seems medieval, that might say only that the medieval artists behind the allusion got it right. If so, the spectator should also be seeing the blood of Christ; if applied to the bullfight, the point would be to believe that God cares not for the supposed triumph in the ring but for the poor animal as it suffers and dies.

Those in the arena will have seen something else as they appreciated the choreography of that ritual violence. The photo captures some of that drama, beginning with the blood bonding of the ornately clad matador, embodiment of art and civilization, with the animal nature of the bull. The antique weapon, gilded clothing, and refined use of the hand together create a charmed circle of performance within which the blood can flow, again and again and again.

That is not the only example of ritualized violence, however.

It could be the hand of a penitent, or of a priest preparing to administer the Host, or of a beggar, or someone about to give a blessing. It is not a hand, however, but a dead hand. There is no blood, but someone was slaughtered in public much like any bull in a ring. There are no vestiges of the middle ages, as this is a thoroughly modern scene with plastic tarp and aluminum hardware. But it is ritualized for all that. Another terrorist bombing in Sri Lanka, an act of violence so common that they have developed little metal fixtures for managing the forensic investigation.

And not without symbolism. That number six refers to a segment of the crime scene marked for photographic identification, yet it signifies more as well: there were others, there will be others, we’re each just a number, take a number and wait and your number will come up soon. There is no blood, but this bureaucratic item is equally horrific. We are supposed to believe that although the killing continues, everything is under control. Everything is not under control. And in a world of ritualized violence, accidental symbolism may be one way to get back to the suffering.

Photographs by Daniel Ochoa de Olza/Associated Press and AFP/Getty Images.